Southern Baptist Executive Committee Agrees to Fund Sexual Abuse Review, Divided on Privilege Waiver

The Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention agreed to spend $1.6 million to fund an external review of how the committee has handled sexual abuse complaints over the past two decades.

After two days of intense meetings and debate, however, the committee remained divided on whether to waive attorney-client privilege as part of the investigation. Rolland Slade, chairman of the Executive Committee and pastor of Meridian Baptist Church in El Cajon, California, said members had made progress in establishing the investigation. He and other committee officers planned to meet with the independent working group that will oversee the review during the coming week to settle its final details.

“We are not finished yet,” Slade said on Tuesday, September 21, at the close of the meetings. “But now we all understand the urgency. And we have a commitment to the working group to find a way forward.” He urged members not to leave Nashville without moving the investigation forward. He noted that messengers, the convention’s local delegates, had instructed the committee to fund the independent investigation and cooperate with it. At one point, Slade warned members of the consequences of failing to act, saying, “That will not be acceptable to messengers.”

The SBC, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, has long worked to respond to sexual abuse in its churches. According to the report, a 2019 investigation by the Houston Chronicle documented hundreds of cases of abuse in Southern Baptist churches over several decades. In response, convention leaders held a lament service and launched a new denominational program to care for survivors of abuse. The denomination also set up a system for severing ties with any church that did not take abuse seriously, and earlier this year the Executive Committee expelled a couple of churches that had abusers on their staff. Caring for survivors and protecting those who are vulnerable remain central to the convention’s response (Proverbs 31:8-9).

The Executive Committee first hired Guidepost Solutions, an international consulting firm, to review its response to abuse. Messengers later took over the review process. They placed a working group in charge of overseeing the investigation and instructed the Executive Committee to waive attorney-client privilege as part of the process.

Ronnie Floyd, chairman of the Executive Committee, has repeatedly promised to cooperate with the investigation but has also set limits on that cooperation, citing the convention’s statutes. Opening the two-day meeting in Nashville, he condemned abuse, mistreatment of survivors and any mishandling of abuse allegations, while also pointing to the limits on cooperation. “I encourage members of the SBC Executive Committee to work with the sexual abuse working group and signing an independent review in all possible ways, but within our trust responsibilities assigned by the messengers,” he said. He also said the committee “is committed to doing the right thing, in the right way, in order to elevate the mission of the Convention: to raise, combine and direct our energies for the global spread of the gospel.”

Bruce Frank, pastor of Biltmore Baptist Church in Arden, North Carolina, and chairman of the abuse working group, urged the committee to waive attorney-client privilege so that investigators can access all the information they need. During Monday’s meeting, he said the messengers had trusted committee members to do the right thing.

Source: Read the original report (translated from Spanish)